Smart Home 2.0: Innovative Smart Home System Powered by Botanical IoT and Emotion Detection

Advances in human-centric technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), application-oriented sensing and smart home, along with recent developments in internet of things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are enabling the design and development of a smarter home with cognitive intelligence. In this paper, we first investigate the integration of smart home and botanical IoT for creating a better living environment to increase people’s quality of life. First, we point out that traditional smart home solution (Smart Home 1.0) only achieves the interaction between users and home appliances in indoor environment, while ignoring the relation between users and indoor greeneries. Then, we discuss the benefits of indoor greeneries for improving indoor living environment which leads a better physical health and mental health for home users. As greeneries are integrated into Smart Home 1.0, we propose an evolution from traditional smart home solution to Smart Home 2.0 to achieve the organic integration between users and greeneries. To verify our proposal, a prototype system of Smart Home 2.0 is designed and implemented. The experimental results show the smooth data flows from sensors deployed in smart green house to data center. A mobile cloud system is built to store, manage and visualize the data for the affective interaction between greeneries and home users. It is foreseeable that the emotion-aware capability of smart home 2.0 will bring more intelligent and interactive healthcare applications for urban residents in the future.